Peers fade away, Popovich presses on

When Spurs coach Gregg Popovich looks down the opposite sideline Saturday night, he is sure to see plenty of empty seats. As the Utah Jazz limp into the AT&T Center near the end of a rare losing season, five players are back home in Salt Lake City nursing injuries.

Yet the vacant chair Popovich is most apt to notice is the one Tyrone Corbin currently occupies.

Jerry Sloan, not prowling the Utah sideline? Popovich never thought he’d see the day.

“It will certainly be strange,” Popovich said.

Saturday’s game marks the Spurs’ first against Utah since Sloan’s abrupt Feb. 10 resignation caused the latest seismic ripple in what has been a cataclysmic year to be an old-school NBA coach.

Over the past 12 months, Don Nelson and Larry Brown — a pair of former Popovich mentors with 4,400 NBA victories between them — have been put out to pasture. Sloan quit in Utah after 23 seasons, citing the extinguishing of his internal fire, and was replaced by Corbin, one of his assistants. In Los Angeles, Phil Jackson, that longtime Spurs nemesis, is planning his exit this summer.

Sloan’s departure left Popovich, in his 15th season in San Antonio, as the league’s longest-tenured coach. Only three other active coaches — Jackson, Denver’s George Karl and Houston’s Rick Adelman — have logged more NBA service time.

When he looks around the NBA, his oldest peers replaced by faces fresh out of the college fraternity, the 62-year-old Popovich feels a little like the last of the dinosaurs, staring down an oncoming meteor.

To say the events of the past year have caused Popovich to reimagine his place in the game, however, is to assume he ever imagined any of this in the first place.

Popovich owns four NBA championships and a .676 winning percentage that ranks third-best all-time, and is amid perhaps the finest coaching job of his career — a 60-19 season that has resulted in the Western Conference’s No. 1 seed.

In many ways, however, Popovich still feels like the glorified jock-washer he used to be as a Division III coach at Pomona-Pitzer.

“I’ve always kind of wondered what the hell I’m doing here and how much longer it’s going to last,” he said. “It keeps lasting.”

Certainly, Popovich didn’t expect to outlast Sloan. Many NBA observers half-assumed Sloan would die on the bench in Utah, and they’d have the wake at halftime.

He was a lifer who could survive nuclear attack, then set about teaching a group of cockroaches the nuances of the pick-and-roll.

When Popovich was a young man on break from the Air Force Academy in the late 1960s, he would meet buddies at a local watering hole in Gary, Ind., where, over plates of fried mushrooms and gallons of Stroh’s beer, they would watch Sloan, in Popovich’s words, “beat the hell out of people” as a guard for the Chicago Bulls.

In NBA parlance, Jerry West is The Logo. But to Popovich, Sloan has always been the crooked-nosed face of the NBA.

“He was like an idol,” Popovich said.

After Popovich commandeered the Spurs’ bench during the 1996-97 season, he patterned much of his program after Sloan’s in Utah.

Spurs assistant Jacque Vaughn, who played his first four seasons under Sloan and his final three under Popovich, notes the similarities between them. Both have the same attention to detail, the same iron-fisted control over their locker room, the same sailor’s command of the English language.

“If you could play for them, you could play for anybody,” Vaughn said.

There are differences, too. Where Popovich is likely to one day retire to the vineyard, Sloan has retired to the back of a tractor.

Under contract through the end of next season, Popovich has no immediate plans to go into wine-making full time. It helps that his players still seem to respond to him.

“I think he does a great job of knowing when to push and when to back off,” said Tony Parker, in his 10th season as Popovich’s point guard.

At no point was that skill more important than during the six-game losing streak at the end of March that threatened to derail the Spurs’ chase of the No. 1 seed. Behind closed doors, players say, Popovich breathed less fire and brimstone than outsiders might expect.

“After the first two, he got really upset and yelled,” Manu Ginobili said. “Then he saw we were a little down, so he started to be more positive. He gave us the tools to get over it.”

A three-game winning streak followed. Wednesday’s victory over Sacramento not only gave the Spurs the West’s No. 1 seed, it gave Popovich his 796th victory, moving him past Boston legend Red Auerbach for second-most all-time with one team.

First on that list: Jerry Sloan with 1,127.

Popovich harbors no intention of ever matching that mark, or much else Sloan accomplished in more than two decades as a company man for the Jazz.

“I won’t even come close,” Popovich said.

And yet, he has already come closer to Sloan than he ever thought possible.